Is PAPpie Ong Ye Kung behaving like a bad Goldie investment banker?

So SMRT bus drivers have given a tight slap to their union chief* and NTUC’s deputy secretary-general, who is also a board member of SMRT Corporation, Ong Ye Kung. He also happens to be part of the PAP GRC team that lost Aljunied. He had told them that working six days a week is a fairly standard arrangement, and insisted that with the increase in basic pay, their salaries will be higher, compared with what they had earned in a five-day work week plus an additional day with overtime pay**.

He is lucky he is not in the US, and not an investment banker. A few months ago, a judge’s ruling made Goldman Sachs potentially liable for some pretty serious damages if shareholders of a company wanted to sue it (Some are). Anyway, the ruling was another hole below the hull in Goldmans fast sinking reputation.

Goldman was on every conceivable side of a deal involving the sale of El Paso. As a result, El Paso may have unwittingly sold itself far too cheaply. Goldman was inherently conflicted because it represented El Paso for part of the time in the sale negotiations with Kinder Morgan, the buyer, and advised El Paso on a possible spinoff of its pipeline business. But Goldman’s private equity arm also owns 19.1% of Kinder Morgan and has two appointees on Kinder Morgan’s board. For more details see links below.

Sounds a bit like Ong’s position. He is everywhere in the proposed pay deal: union leader of the drivers, negotiating for drivers, leader of the constructive, nation-building NTUC, SMRT director, and who knows where else.

No wonder, the drivers don’t trust his judgment.

And then there is a big question mark on his character. His dad, now deceased, was a fierce opponent of the PAP. So fierce, that he was detained under ISA. Yet he joined the NTUC, a training ground for Sith Lords. And became a PAPpie after dad died, standing in Aljunied GRC and helped create history by being part of George Yeo’s losing team: first PAP, and combine ministerial and NTUC team (two cabinet ministers and one jnr minister and two NTUC leaders) to lose a GRC.

conflict of interest? To these guys who control the system, they have completely redefined it as things done “in the interest of the nation” in their twisted view. He who holds the power makes the rules. We all know it is wrong except them.